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Monthly Archives: November 2012

GNOME is changing, as every community driven project, GNOME is involved in a daily evolution.
Every day, some new feature is added, some new ideas are developed, some new intuitions are followed.

A challenge that leads every day to different road enlightened by a new thrilling vision, enforced by designers’ effort to make GNOME the best user experience for everyone.
But GNOME is not only designers, and it’s important remember that a such ambitious project needs – to reach its goals – of a great amount of lovers that will help out to step up.

Recently I had time to reflect about the way people could step in a FLOSS project – i.e. this is one of the issues we’re used to discuss in Ubuntu Women project – what kind of greeting is expected and what kind of greeting instead is reserved to newcomers.

GNOME has a strong core of die-hard developers that, in time have created an unique connection, made by a friendship and a common vision built during daily brainstorming on communication channels that keep in touch people very different form each others for experience, place of living, backgrounds, but everyone moved from the same passion.

It’s quite easy to comprehend that, sometimes, could be not so simple to be able to step in this circle of trust, switching from passive user to active contributor.

The question that more often is addressed from lovers is: “How can I participate? What can I do for this project?”

My first contact with FLOSS world has been GNOME mediated. GNOME offered to me a simple and simply-to-use interface for my daily work, but I followed with attention all the deep changing that lead GNOME 2 to GNOME 3 and the great revolution brought by GNOME Shell.

I had the fortune to get in touch with some special guys on #gnome-it that led me in exploring this exciting new land, and this gave me the opportunity to understand that, behind the charge someone could fling of a lack of focus, there is only a lack of comprehension of what’s happening.

It’s true, sometimes designers and developers have little time to deeply explain what they’re making, and this make harder to find a way to contribute, but I’m sure GNOME is a great and welcoming community to whom everyone could give an hand, “that the powerful play goes on, and everyone will contribute a gesture”.

By my side, I believe that participation needs comprehension, and this post could be read as a try-out to comprehend GNOME, and therefore, to participate.